My original plan was to do a drawing of both a bear skull and a seal skull, because I’d learned on a recent whale watching trip in the San Juan Islands that bears, sea lions and seals are all closely related. I was going to draw a bear skull and a seal skull to compare them.

But at the Burke, these skulls looked more dissimilar than I had expected. A couple of those differences are that the bear’s skull is much larger, and that the bear’s back teeth are meant for grinding, rather than the seal’s sharp back teeth, which are meant for tearing.

While the black bear skull was far larger than the seal skull, I was surprised that the black bear skull seemed much smaller than how a bear’s head seems in real life. Jeff Bradley (from the Burke’s mammalogy collection) pointed out that the muscles and all that fur add up to make a living bear’s head much bigger.

I might still get to that seal skull, or maybe one of the cool seal skeletons they have there hanging from the back rooms at the Burke…

I again visited the collections at the Burke Museum Mammalogy department, and Jeff Bradley, the collection manager, generously took this skeleton of a sun bear down from a high shelf so I could draw it.

It came from the Woodland Park Zoo, but the Burke Museum is uncertain whether this particular bear actually lived at the zoo, or whether the zoo got this skeleton from another zoo. The zoo used this skeleton for educating kids and visitors. It had been handled quite a bit, so you can see it is missing a couple of feet!

I had the privilege of drawing again today at the Burke Museum’s Mammalogy lab. Jeff, who runs the place, asked me what I’d like to draw, and I gave him only the vague answer of “some kind of interesting skull.” He suggested a carnivore and brought out the skull of a lion.

This lion turned out to be not just any lion, but Jake, who lived at the Woodland Park Zoo for about 20 years. He passed away in May, 2011.

Jake started out at the zoo living alone, but after a few years he was introduced to a new female lion named Juanita. The two became close and got along very well their whole lives.

I can’t help wondering about the animals I draw, and now I know exactly whom I was spending the day with today. I read that Jake loved to roar, and that made me smile. What a beautiful, amazing animal.